As microprocessor architecture becomes more and more complex to support high performance applications, I/O management presents a challenge. Existing techniques to address the problem of I/O management have a number of disadvantages. One technique uses software-only I/O virtualization to support virtual machine (VM) I/O. This technique has limited functionality, performance, and robustness.
The functionality seen by the guest operating system (OS) and applications is limited by the functionality supported by the virtual devices emulated in the VM monitor (VMM) software. The guest I/O operations are trapped by the VMM and proxied or emulated before being submitted to the underlying physical-device hardware, resulting in poor performance.
In addition, all or parts of the device driver for the hardware device are run as part of the privileged VMM software, which may adversely affect overall robustness of the platform. Techniques using specialized translation structures can only support a specific device or a limited usage model. General I/O memory management units provide only support for I/O virtual address spaces of limited size or complexity.